 So, this debate, the topic is the four freedoms and the open source definition are outdated and no longer relevant in 2020. Our debaters are Amanda Brock, Neil McGovern, Matt Jarvis, Louis Villa, and I don't think I... Oh, I'm sorry. Andrew Cash, as I mentioned, Andrew Cash, and I'm going to give it over to Amanda. So can you hear me now? Yeah. Yeah, okay. So, I am not debating currently. I'm just going to say a few words to you because I caused this debate to be suggested at Falsedem when the debate format came out. And I requested this slot because we had had a meeting last year under Chatham High's Rules as lawyers, and there were some really vicious arguments going on. And obviously, I can't attribute them to anybody because it was Chatham High's Rules, but it seemed like we'd reached a point where this discussion needed to be had more broadly. And this group of people were willing to come and talk about it. I will say that I asked a lot more people to come and talk, and most people didn't want to debate. I don't know if this is common across the debates, but particularly women didn't want to debate. So we have five of us. We did have six earlier in the week. We've had one drop out. So what we're going to do is slightly different, I guess. We are going to run through the panel order of 773383, but we are going to just flow a little bit more somewhere between a traditional sort of high school debate format and a panel session. And we really want to get the audience debating with us, which was really why we put this in in the first place to discuss what's going on. So with that, I'm going to hand over to Lewis, who's the first proposer. So my disclaimer here, I mean, there is the standard disclaimer. And I want to particularly stress that I, until recently, was a card-carrying FSF member and I'm a member of the open source initiative, was a member of the open source initiative board. So please use that in context when I say some things that are going to come across pretty harsh. So, seven, 20, I can go. Someone was impressed that I had all these notes and I said that I can talk about this for hours without notes, but if I only have seven minutes, then I really need notes. So the first thing to know about whether or not the four freedoms and open source definition are still relevant today in 2020 is that these documents are 20 years old. If these documents still made sense 20 years after they were written in exactly the same way that they were written without having a line changed at them, they would be some of the most prescient documents in human history. So it is, I think, not a criticism of their authors to say that they didn't fully understand where the industry was going to be, right? They didn't know that SAS would take, they didn't even know what SAS was. They didn't know that SAS was going to take over. They didn't know about the growth of data, privacy, and ethical concerns, though in the case of the four freedoms, some of those were, the outlines of some of those were beginning to come into view, but the centrality of technology to all those questions would have been difficult to see. Of course, the centrality of open source and free software to the entire industry, that was a pipe dream that we all wanted. And we wrote these definitions in part with this sort of like, well, we will fight to get there instead of with the reality of, hey, we've won. Open source software has won. Free software, pointedly I will point out, has not won. And of course, we've gone from fitting everyone in open source onto the campus of one university, to literally there are more people doing open source now than live in all of Brussels, or probably all of Belgium. I should have checked the population of Belgium before I started this. So, the next thing I want to say about why these definitions are outdated, is where do you see communities anywhere in these definitions? Every time people talk about free software and open source in the healthiest positive sense, they talk about collaboration of communities of connected people. The reason we are all here at FOSDEM is because of the amazing, wonderful community that has formed around this. And yet, if you look in these things, they are all about these dry technical things about copyright law. They speak nothing to what has actually been most powerful, which is the communities that have formed around them. One important way to think about GPL v2, which predates the OSD and the Four Freedoms, is that by enforcing a certain level of sharing, it makes a compromise on freedom in order to help build community. We have lost that language. We don't know how to compromise on data. Well, I was gonna say on source code, but it's also in data, right? Van Lindberg is here, has been trying to get a license through the open source initiative process, where guess what? Software in 2020 without data is junk, it's useless. And yet, the open source definition says nothing about data. It says nothing about how we use this stuff. And so when we have to fight through these outdated definitions. Man, I'm making great time. I don't know, it's got a benefit, a curse. Another thing, so I was actually, let me transition then into the data thing. It is perfectly compliant with the four freedoms in the open source definition to distribute software that won't build, install, or run. And it's limited to the software that you have in your hands, right? So if I got the software from you, then hey, maybe we can put some requirements into place that I'm required to have it. But if it's on a server, the four freedoms sort of speaks to that. The open source definition does not speak to that at all. And so in the world of 2020, when so much of our software isn't actually ever in our hands, the four freedoms in open source definition don't answer that question. And it's central to how we think about things, right? And again, some of these licenses, like AGPL, like the cryptographic autonomy license, which I'm always going to want to call the cryptonomy license, those things aren't spoken to by the four freedoms in the OSD. And of course, there's this question that I sort of alluded to earlier. Is this question of what we use software for? In other words, what is the ethics of the software we use? Now the four freedoms conceptually are grounded in ethics, right? We believe in the four freedoms because we believe that that leads to a more ethical software. But the four freedoms aren't tests of ethics. The four freedoms are tests of, well, can I change this software? Do I have the right, doesn't say anything about the ability to change software, doesn't say anything about, are we, everyone in this room, is in the 1% of people in the world, probably the 0.1% of people in the world, in the level of control that we have over our software, right? The four freedoms has nothing about that other 99.9%. Now, the FSF, to their great credit, does say other things about that. But it's not captured in the four freedoms. If the FSF, the organization, went away tomorrow and we had to rebuild from the four freedoms, it would tell us very little about all this other important stuff, things like accessibility, things like privacy. Look in the four freedoms and you won't find those things. And of course, that was obvious enough, that was already a problem in 2006. When I started law school, a classmate of mine who now works for the American Civil Liberties Union asked me why is software morally important? Now, those of you who've gone to law school know that most people in law school are drunk most of the time. And so that's part of why I couldn't answer her question. But my answer was big and sprawling and they were not convinced, right? To talk to her now and to say why is software morally important is, of course, an obvious question, right? We all know from Facebook upsetting our elections. We know from the privacy implications of all this stuff that software at the end of the day mediates essentially every human transaction. And so who controls software and who can use it has immense impact on issues of justice. And again, the open source definition says nothing of justice. It says nothing of morality. And the four freedoms only tangentially does. To put it another way, when this was about Richard struggling with his printer saying no restrictions on my use was good enough. When this is about Exxon using free software to extract carbon from the ground more efficiently, or the Department of Defense using Linux based cloud systems to bomb the whole world more efficiently. Don't we need to have some sense of ethics in those definitions, right? In a world that is entirely driven by software, we need to be thinking about the bigger picture because access and modification is simply not enough. To quote Bradley, I yield the remainder of my time. You're on your thing, let's just put that on there. Yeah, okay. So obviously we don't agree with Lewis's stand in the middle and I've got my notes here. So I think if we look back to the 1990s when these ideas were codified, it's important, I think, and useful to step back and revisit some of the why these things came into being. So if we look back to the 1990s, mobile phones were pretty uncommon. Mass adoption of the internet was pretty nascent. Many people didn't have home computers. The World Wide Web was just getting going. And as we fast forward 30 years, as Lewis said, software has become completely pervasive in our lives. So the control over the software that you use has become exponentially more important than it was then. For the vast majority of people in the first world at least, computing permeates everything we do at work and in leisure time. And really, open source and free software has enabled all of this. Linux and the surrounding utilities from GNU and elsewhere now runs our planet, everything from the tiniest embedded device to the biggest supercomputers. Android powers most of the world's mobile devices. Tor enables persecuted minorities and whistleblowers to communicate securely. Combined NTPD and all the other low-level networking components power the internet. OpenStack and Kubernetes enable technology disruptions in every industry from telcos to banking. OpenSSL protects our online world. OpenSSH allows us to use computers securely. The list goes on and on. And without free and open source software, we would likely have had none of the global cloud providers. Google, Amazon, Azure and every other player in that space run almost entirely on open source software. And without the four freedoms in the open source definition, our world could have been very different. For those of us who were around during that time, it was not at all obvious that Linux would take us to where we are today. There were definitely points in the 90s and the early 2000s when the open source and free software movements could easily have lost those battles. This was the era of the CEO of Microsoft saying Linux is a cancer. The days of encryption and computing power considered to be offensive weapons that needed controlling. And the days of things like the Skoll lawsuit against IBM claiming ownership over Linux. So there were definitely armies ranged against us. And ultimately the power of community which the four freedoms and the OSD have given us proved to be the best way of producing high quality software. And that's ultimately proved to be the tipping point. So whilst those things are both specific about source code, I think that source code in a way isn't necessarily the most important aspect of that, it's what goes along with that access to source code that's really had that power to change the world. Creating community around software, communities in terms of developers and communities in terms of users, is what has enabled the creation of world changing software projects like Linux, like Kubernetes, like OpenStack. Without community, none of those projects would have been able to achieve the success that they have had and our world would likely be a very different place. As an example of that in the 2000s, Microsoft were giving customers access to source code. But that doesn't actually provide to users the things that are implied in the four freedoms and the OSD. That doesn't give them that ability to change and integrate or the ability to influence the development of that software. That can only happen with open design, open development processes, all of which ultimately come back to community. And I think that the ideas behind the four freedoms and the OSD have also permeated across our culture in lots of different ways. They're powerful concepts that have a light of their own. We can look at publishing around the creative commons. We can look at examples in the legal field, things like GROC law. And we can look at the open hardware movement where we're now applying the ideas of open collaboration and sharing to hardware design and development. And so these ideas of openness have really taken root in our culture. Many very large companies now have adopted those open source principles internally and externally as the best way of developing complex software. So in an era where our entire lives are focused around platforms, where we store our photos, our personal data, our emails, our interactions with our friends and loved ones, openness becomes increasingly important. Non-open platforms do put us at risk of arbor changes in terms and conditions. Often also removing our ability to question those decisions. Our videos might get removed from YouTube. Our Facebook posts get taken down. Our Twitter accounts frozen. And it's often impossible to appeal against those kinds of decisions. We may have access to remove because of where we live, because of our religious beliefs or because of arbitrary political changes that we have no control over. And we've also still got a healthy ecosystem of corporate patent trolls attacking free software on a regular basis. So I'd argue that the four freedoms and the open source definition have become more important as concepts in the times that they were first defined. Whilst it is true that in a world dominated by on-demand computing and software as a service, it may have become harder to appreciate their relevance, but the ideas and concepts that they embody have never been more important. I cede the 58 seconds. Do you want this one? OK. Right, it looks like I have seven minutes. I'm prepared for three, so I will speak very, very slowly. Also somewhat confusingly, I am also going to be speaking in support of the four freedoms because of the fact that there was a change in running order because one of the speakers dropped out. If the open source definition and the four freedoms are outdated, then why have they been used more recently by organisations such as the Open Source Hardware Association or the Open Hardware and Design Alliance or the Open Knowledge Foundation? In each case, there's the basis for their own set of equivalent freedoms and principles in those particular fields of endeavour. So open hardware, open source hardware, open data have all adopted principles that are very closely based on either the four freedoms or the open source definition. And there's a reason for that, and the reason is that those principles still hold and they still work. And my experience, I've been involved in drafting the open hardware licence, and as part of that experience, I found that reference back to both the four freedoms and the open source definition proved to be very useful on numerous occasions, particularly because during the drafting process, people continued to say to us, wouldn't it be great if the open hardware licence could do this, wouldn't it be great if it could do that? They wanted it to, for example, ensure that any hardware that was made and licensed under the open hardware licence was sustainably produced. Great idea. That's very laudable aim, certainly. They also wanted to make sure that any hardware that was produced was fixable as well. So that would easily accessible, things like don't use security fastenings, don't glue things unless you absolutely have to, make sure that you can take things to pieces, you can substitute components most easily. Again, that's a great idea. And more generally, various suggestions trying to prevent the hardware that was licensed under the CERN Open hardware licence from being used for evil, whatever that evil happened to be, whether it was evil that was used as a weapon or in some sort of non-environmental fashion. So we kept on getting inundated with all of these very, very laudable ideas. And we felt very strongly that we needed to reject those because we would have ended up with a licence that was effectively useless. It would have had, it would be so cumbersome to use, it would restrict the use of the hardware so much, we were trying to anticipate a whole bunch of things that really it wasn't appropriate to put in, what in essence is an intellectual property rights licence. And the easiest way to counter that was to go back to the original definitions. Now, there's absolutely no reason at all why you shouldn't campaign for these other things as well. In fact, there's, you know, yes, go out there and argue for environmental sustainability. Go out there and argue that hardware should be capable of being easily repaired and so on. But those are separate issues. And if you want to look at things in the software context like, you know, sustainable community development and this sort of thing, then that's surely a place for a separate set of principles that go alongside the fundamental principles about software freedom and the open source definition. Lost my notes there for a second. Yeah. Yeah, so... I can cross the interview. Yeah, no, no, that's fine. So, yes, I couldn't prepare for three minutes anyway. So my fundamental point is the open source definition and the four freedoms, they remain relevant and fundamental bedrock of what we're doing. There are plenty of other things that are also good, beneficial and we should consider campaigning for those separately, but don't try to conflate them all into a single set of principles. Thank you. I'm speaking for seven minutes apparently. Excellent. I've prepared three minutes worth of stuff as well and I thought, no, it's fine, I can fill that. I'll fill it, it's okay. And I thought I was going to be opposing it but you just oppose it as well. So I'll just kind of talk for seven minutes probably on both. I can start off speaking against. I don't know, okay. So I recently came back from the China Open Source Convention and Tencent there had done a study and tried to estimate how much of the world's computing was now of software running today was open source and they estimated over 95% of all software running is open source. We've won. It's brilliant, we've reached this utopia where everyone is in control and why does it not feel like this? There's something slightly odd here. For me, I'm going to say something slightly controversial which is I don't care about free software. I care about user freedoms. The intention behind making free software is important but it's irrelevant if the reality is that users can't make use of those freedoms. Lewis was quite near. It's less than half a percent of the world's population can code. The chance of users being able to modify their own hardware or being rich enough to be able to afford to find someone and contract someone else to modify that software is bansionally small and it's our responsibility I feel to provide for that user first. Does it matter if a piece of code is GPL or BSD licensed? If your data is being sent to a third party to modify and monetize, does it matter if something happens to be under an MIT license if you can't access your computing because you have a disability or you can't afford a really fast internet connection to get all the latest software or the metadata that comes with it? That said, the question is that the four freedoms and the OSI is outdated and no longer relevant. It is not what kind of world are we trying to make. I put to you that we can't build that world without those four freedoms. Yes, it is, Lewis is absolutely right. I completely agree with him. Openness is important. Community is important. Control of data is absolutely fundamental. I absolutely agree with him. But we can't get that without those four freedoms. They are the foundations on which we build this world we want to live in. To say just get rid of them because it's not doing enough doesn't mean that you should get rid of them in the first place. And my question, I guess, to those who say they are outdated and no longer relevant is simple. Which would you ever move? Thank you. Does that work? Yes. So I've sort of drawn the short straw here. I have to sum up both sides. Set up the straw. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no, no, I know, I know. But I've drawn the straw. I'm going to explain why it's... Yeah, yeah, no, no, no. Nobody's making me do anything. I'm here of my own volition. I have the short straw because we are five, not six. So we're not even. So I sort of have a double sum up to do based on both sides. So I'm sort of going to try if it's possible to make the case for both sides. And obviously I've just written my notes now to do a sum up. So if we think about what the guys have said, it's very clear and ran throughout everybody's talk that we're sitting in a stage of confusion, right? Everybody has said that there's a lack of clarity, a lack of transparency and a confusion across the half a percent that we agree on in the end that's in this room and beyond. So how do we get to a stage of confusion? I think that if we look back on the history of both the Four Freedoms and the OSD, we see people choosing to work and to give their personal time in those environments because they believed and because they wanted to do something. So they made that decision to go and become developers working in those areas as opposed to proprietary. And that was a really clear decision for each and every one of them to make when they made it. Now life has moved on and we've heard people talk about it being a victim of our own success in some ways. And as it's moved on, I think there might have been a bit of a disconnect. So a lot of people in this room because a lot of you are much, much younger than me have grown up with open and free being part of your day-to-day existence. And that's a good thing and that's a commendable thing but you haven't had to go through that same choice process. And that same choice process you would hope would have been given to you and let you make an informed decision about what and why you do it. But if it's just the norm, you accept the norm and you don't challenge it. And I'm told, I'm the age I am so I haven't grown up 20 years later, but I'm told that it hasn't been clear to people. So I remember having an argument a year ago with a developer I really respect who kept telling me public source and open source were the same thing. And they're not because you don't have a license with public source and if you don't have a license it's not open source, right? It's very clear. So I think we have what the boys have talked about as a confusion for no bad reason and we need to think about what that confusion is, where it's come from, why it's there. And to help us understand not just the decisions the developers made to become open and free developers, we also have to understand what was meant by open and free. So we've got the OSD, we've got the four freedoms but those were developed at a time when we didn't have social media. So we don't see years and years of Twitter feeds, we don't see archives of many of the conversations around some of those. I mean, put your hand up if you believe that the OSI developed the OSD. Where did the OSD come from? Yeah, I know, I'm just going to see. I'm not sure that I trust the hands up thing here. So where did the OSD come from? Right, good. So did Bruce go up to a mountain and heave this bit of stone back down with 10 things to find there that could not be changed. No, he didn't, he didn't at all. What he did was come up with something that in the context and in the time seemed to be reasonable. It's worked for 20 years, so it's certainly reasonable. We've seen the success that the boys have talked about in open source. Maybe we are a victim of our own success but it has been successful. So we've got to give it credit, we've got to respect it and we should try and understand where it came from and why it's the way it is. So every one of those words there would have been thought through. Every one of those words there has allowed us to get to a stage in history where we can say we've won. Right, where we can have this massive conference where Lewis can stand up and with hard facts to back him tell us that the whole of the Belgian country would not add up to the number of open source developers we have in the world. So we have one, but why do we trust something just so absolutely? Now I like to challenge things as some of you who know me know. And I've wondered long and hard about that. Why do we just trust it? Well you have to have something to base it on. Right, so they always say I didn't get a trademark. Does that really matter? Do we care? We know what open source is because we have a definition. But I think that anything that we follow, if we look at laws, maybe Americans you find this different with the constitution that's written. But generally for most of us, we're looking at something there that changes and evolves over time. We change, we mature, we grow up. Our technology has changed over the last 50 years, over the last 10 years. It's not just the internet, it's the fact you have connectivity everywhere. It's not just that you can access things online, it's the fact that you walk around with a phone in your hand the whole time. So our world is unrecognizable from the time that this was written. It has to be logical and sensible for us to challenge it, right? There'd be something wrong with this group, this group of highly intelligent people if you weren't constantly pushing back and challenging. But I think that for us to make that challenge appropriately, we have to go back and understand what happened, why? What every word means, why every word is there? Where are the things that maybe we don't know about that we need to understand in a context? How do the changes affect those words? How do the changes allow us to develop into something perhaps more of 2020? Oh no. You're going to applaud when you get to the end. Oh no, because I've got so much more to tell you. Right, so I have to speed up. So we should be able to challenge, we should be able to look at this, we need to think more about what changes mean and how that's going to impact us. Can I grab the mic and cross-examine some of you? Me. Me. Stand in the... Well, I want to cross-examine Neil and Andrew, if I may. But we can... Yes. Can I have three for each of them? Sure, sounds good. I guess I'm the other way, huh? So, Andrew, you said that... You said that... Oh yeah, negative time, sweets. I'm going to go into the future. Andrew, you said that these issues of... Well, you mentioned, for example, environmental issues that people wanted to bake into the open hardware. And you said that these are separate issues. But if my labor, as somebody contributing to an open project is being used to literally bake the planet, how is this... This seems to me that it's inextricably the same. Can you explain what you mean by saying that they're separate? I think the thought process is that you need to go through to reach a set of criteria that are essentially about freedom to use something and freedom to copy it and freedom to study how it works and so on and so forth are fundamentally different from the set of criteria that you need to apply when you're looking at wider social issues. And as I say, I have absolutely no problem at all. In fact, I think it's highly laudable to come up with a set of principles that deal with these other issues. But I cannot see how it's possible to try to get essentially one document to do the heavy lifting for all of these things in one go. But shouldn't I have some ability to discriminate and say I would prefer the planet not be baked with the work that I have done? Of course. And so you have a separate set of criteria. So you can say that, you know, that these particular hardware, whatever it is, not only does it comply with a set of open source hardware criteria, it also complies with a set of criteria that I want to apply to it that deal with environmental issues. So if somebody then takes that, then they would have to comply with both of those sets of criteria if they want to continue to describe it as being open source hardware and environmentally sustainable hardware. But if they don't care because they're Exxon, they're free to use it anyway. Well, that's dependent from the person who initially establishes the hardware design. It's up to their choice what restrictions that they're going to put on. There may be mutual incompatibilities there. That's true. That's something that we have to work through. But I think this is a debate that we had quite extensively when we were talking about the CERN open hardware license. And we felt that we just weren't equipped to be able to think about these specific issues outside the scope of the, essentially the sort of license intellectual property freedoms that we were trying to grant people to enable them to use the particular designs. Right. I have one other question that I want to ask you, but I'm going to switch to Neil because we're halfway through. So you asked what would I remove from the open source definition? And I would prefer to think of that as what would you add? Because, so for example, you mentioned accessibility and I know that's something that you and GNOME care deeply about and have the, there's nothing in the four freedoms or open source definition about accessibility. And iOS by every serious use by people with accessibility concerns, believe that iOS, which is definitely not free, is substantially more accessible than Mamo to name the last fully open source mobile operating system I used or early Android, which was more open source than current Android. Should we be adding to the four freedoms or open source definition to be, to take into consideration, for example, accessibility? I think it's incredibly important and I'm sure you agree that accessibility is considered and there is many things. I think we all agree that we need to improve and we need to add. I don't think the four freedoms in the open source definition is the place to do that. I should also point out this big thing here. When I say I believe this, I may or may not believe this. However, as an example of this, I'm not a lawyer. So being cross examined by employers, a little bit worrying. I was on the city council in Cambridge and a motion was passed that we should only use free range eggs everywhere. It's brilliant, fantastic. And we can no longer give flu vaccines to the staff because that uses egg protein and there was no way to guarantee it. Do we want to mess about with ensuring with messing these two things up? I think there's unforeseen circumstances. So if the city council had insisted that everything that all software used by the city council was free software and that meant that accessible staff couldn't use it, would that be okay? Great answer. Okay, so who wants to cross? Is that Amanda or Neil? Who wants to cross Lewis and does anyone want to join Lewis, I guess is it? For the record, I'm not the kind of lawyer who does cross examinations. So, which... I think it's a new thing to us because we don't normally do this in debate, so that's why we're confused. Okay, and so when we get to like 20 seconds before the end of the time, so you hear some of us snapping or rubbing our fingers, if everybody joins us, it's a lovely, soft way to let people know that their deadline's coming and then we all applaud at the end and then they know they have to be done. Oh yeah, sure. Neil's going to redeem himself. Yeah, so I've never cross-examined anyone in my life. I'm not that kind of lawyer. I was a commercial lawyer, not a litigator, so I don't quite know how to do this. Lewis, you talk about the sort of ethical stuff and putting requirements in there, and apart from the fact that it doesn't work within the current definitions, how would you ever make that work in real life? So how do you enforce that? And sort of how do you make those decisions? Well, they're hard. I think the interesting question, I think the interesting answer to that is to say that if you'd ask the same questions about copy left before the GPL was written or indeed even after GPL v.1, the answer would have been, I don't know. Right? But you're making the case for it, so you have to know. No, I don't. What I have to know is that if we experiment, as we did in early open source licensing, I have faith that most of those experiments will fail terribly, but that at least some of them may hit on workable answers. And so the current open source definition, as it stands, rejects all experiments out of hand. Says, if you experiment with ethical licensing in any way, the OSI will wag its finger very, very vigorously at you and tell you that what you're doing is a bad thing, right? And I actually agree with the OSI that 99% of this is terrible ideas, right? But I don't want to be the one to say to that 1%, you know, I try to put myself in the shoes of the people who criticized Stallman early on, right? Who said, copy left will never work, this is unenforceable, this is communist. And if we had let those people determine the playing fields, then none of this would have happened, right? Instead, we allowed some experimentation in licensing and most of the early open source licenses are not used, most of them were failures, but yet some of them did, right? Some of them did succeed. Okay, so give me an example of how you might see that work, how you think that could possibly work. Well, I mean, there's two different, two different levels where this would work, right? One level is the open source initiative could say certain types of discrimination are allowed. And in fact, I would say that the open source initiative has already said that certain types of discrimination are allowed against certain types of business models like say putting proprietary kernels in your phone, right? Like that is a business model that is explicitly disfavored by the OSI because they allow the GPL, right? Similarly, the OSI discriminates against certain SAS business models by allowing the AGPL. Now, we pretend that that's not discrimination against certain business models, except when it comes up to, oh, well, data is a business model, so we can't discriminate against proprietary data. Well, guess what? We already discriminated against proprietary stuff. So we do all the time. So one thing would be to simply acknowledge that discrimination is happening. And allow for a little bit more of it. On the how might it work on an ethical license side, come to Copy Left Conf on Monday. But I think the trick, as all the lawyers know, to writing something that actually works is often about how you manage ambiguity, right? So a lot of these early, there's a very well-intentioned license called the atmosphere license, I think. That essentially said that any entity that had more than $10,000 invested in carbon-extracting businesses, which is essentially every business of any decent size, because of the nature of the stock market and how they invest their money, couldn't use the software, right? And that, I would agree, is unworkable. But you could imagine there's a list of the top 100 carbon-investing businesses themselves, right? And you could simply say, if you're on that list, you can't use this. Every other business can use it. So you say you believe in free and open source software, right? Yeah, no? Yeah, I mean, for purposes of this debate, maybe, for real life, for the record, disclaimer. Oh, come on, come on. No, it's either you believe in it or you don't believe in it. Come on. I am deeply concerned that open, as we currently define it, removes a lot of ethical constraints and doesn't solve actual ethical problems that we have, right? It doesn't make Android more accessible than iOS. We pretend it's better, but if you have any kind of visibility impairment, for example, it's not better. And similarly, if Exxon is using it to extract carbon from the grounds. Okay, is there a danger that you might be being really, really naive and that if you, sorry, Lewis, this is not personal, I may or may not believe this. Of course, of course. But isn't there a danger that if you make this one exception and potentially you open a floodgate for people who might be less well-intentioned than you are in terms of doing that? Absolutely, yeah. How wrong am I? Very wrong. And I eat. How naive am I? Is there anyone other, with all due respect, is there anyone other than the legal Debra regulars who has a question? If I don't know your name, it would be awesome to have a question. Really, and people who think that the motion is right will get preference, so anybody who wants to say the motion is right. The motion was, again, that the, oh, it's gone, that the OSD and the Fourth Freedoms are out of date. Remember for video, please, always speak into the mic. Thank you, Lewis. The motion was that the Fourth Freedoms and OSD are out of date and not fit for purpose in 2020. No longer relevant. No longer relevant in 2020. If you want someone who believes in that, to ask us a question. Karla Piano. Or ask yourself. No, no, no, Karla. I'll ask a question for what Lewis just said. So considering that the history of GPL includes sanctions against South Africa and sort of not putting South Africa on a list in the license, so that once they reformed, then there wouldn't be like a license in legacy having an embargo against them anymore. So if we put Exxon on a list and Exxon reformed, how would that work? I mean, I don't want to get into too much detail on this because I think it's a bit of a distraction from the bigger picture, but there are, for example, in this particular case, there are third parties who publish new such lists every year, specifically with the idea that they could be, that they could reform, right? They might drop off that list and so therefore you might not want universities to divest from them, for example, right? And so if you say, look, if you drop off the list, great. Now that requires partnering with a third party, which historically, I gotta say, is not something our communities have been terribly good at. And I say that with lots of love. So it's not easy, right? I mean, I think something that Bradley told me some time ago that I think is deeply right is that copy left was really a big conceptual leap and I want us to be open to the notion that there might be some big conceptual leaps just because we've seen in the past six months some well-intentioned but badly drafted licenses does not mean that there will never be a well-drafted license. And the question is how we react to that or, frankly, how we get left behind. And I think that's really important both in terms of the conversation about the RSD and on a more broad basis. We have to think about how do we deal with this, right? How are we going to look at changing it? If we are gonna change anything, how could it possibly change? And what is the impact of the past? What does change look like that is done in a measured? What does change look like that's done in a measured, thoughtful way is a really great question to ask that moves us beyond this binary of the debate. Hi, and thank you for this debate. I've been in industry for a very, very long time. I don't know what the four freedoms are. Can we define them? Actually, can I respond to that? Yeah. I said no. So here's the thing. You are in great company. This is something I didn't have time to fit into my talk, but I will take the opportunity to say it right now, which is that one of the, I was speaking recently to a lead developer of one of the most widely used JavaScript frameworks in the world, which is to say one of the most widely used pieces of software in the entire world. And he said, I don't understand why you all are still discussing this. We just think that open source means we get to collaborate and we do it on, we probably do it on GitHub. And as long as I can still collaborate, these needles on, how many angels are on the head of a pin are not super relevant to him, right? And I think that's a, as we grow from 100,000 developers to 100 million developers, most of those people are not gonna know what the four, you weren't, how many people here know what the four freedoms are? All right. Okay. Yeah, how many of you would feel comfortable coming down here and reciting them? Because I admit I wouldn't actually, Neil. Just before you pass it to Neil, I'm gonna say maybe we need something that isn't open or free to be defined. Maybe there's a need for these other things that people are talking about that they're doing to be described somewhere. Yes, I can repeat them because they've just been placed in front of me. It is basically, you can, you get a program. I'm not gonna read off this because it's a boring way of doing it. You get a program, you can run it. You can use it for whatever you want. And that's actually the first one, I think is what's being talked about here of part of the problem is for whatever you want. What if I make a program and I don't want you to do what you want to do? But that's kind of tied into the fundamental freedom there of you can do whatever you want with it. It's your software, you're in control of your own computing. And I think if, and that is so fundamentally tied into this concept of these four freedoms. I mean, the other ones is things like you can modify it, you can give it to your friends. You can redistribute to the entire communities and there's various tests which come along with that like desert island tests, Chinese distant tests and things like that. But the fundamental, the first freedom, the zero freedom is that you can run it for any purpose. Now, if the author is saying you can't use it for evil for example, then what is evil? And then how do you enforce that? Or if I say you can't, or we have a magic list, what happens if I produced a load of free software and it's absolutely brilliant? And then I get on that list. All right, so thank you very much. So audience, did you learn anything from this debate? Raise your hand. Excellent. And the other question is, did you change your mind on anything as a result of this debate?